English

I Shall be Released

Niall O'Donnell 5 Comments

Browsing the internet yesterday, I noticed an article headlined thus: Marvel’s Dr. Strange has already released in the UK (and here in Ireland too, so I might catch it soon). Nothing  too strange (no pun intended, but gladly accepted) there, you might think. But that has already released… really bothers me. It shouldn’t, but it does. Why? Because every fibre of my pedantic being tells me that it should be:

Marvel’s Dr. Strange has already been released in the UK.

Let’s step back for a moment and look at the grammar behind that feeling. Continue reading →

Straight to Heck

Niall O'Donnell 11 Comments

I’ve probably heard or read the word Hell a lot more in the past few days than I would normally. I touched on this briefly before when I wrote about swearing, but it is interesting how we treat the word. It seems logical enough that in countries which were strongly influenced by Christianity, the word might be a little taboo. People understandably tiptoe around the word a little bit, because Hell really is the worst place imaginable. Only the reality  when I was young was much different. I thought nothing of uttering a casual What the Hell? when surprised. I knew better than to go full-on WTF in the presence of my parents or teachers, but no-one would ever really bat an eyelid at What the Hell. Even as I was saying it, I never even stopped to consider the fact that the phrase contained the word Hell. It was just part of the whole exclamation. At the same time, I got quite familiar with the word heck, and its associated phrases, from American TV. But, in perhaps another one of my linguistic blindspots (though come one, I was a child), I never connected the two words. Continue reading →

Hallowe’en Reads: “Gramma”

Niall O'Donnell 7 Comments

Any list of recommendations for Hallowe’en reading would seem incomplete without an entry from Stephen King. I’ll forego some of the more obvious choices from among his novels though, and instead choose one of his shorter short stories: “Gramma.”

The premise is very simple: 10-year old George Bruckner lives with his 14-year old brother Buddy and their single mother Ruth. Staying with them is Ruth’s ancient, senile, bedridden grandmother. When Buddy breaks his leg playing baseball, Ruth goes to the hospital out of town to see him, leaving George alone to look after Gramma. Continue reading →

S: the Story of a Letter

Niall O'Donnell 19 Comments

If you’re a native English speaker, you probably don’t think about individual letters too often. Why would you? You use them pretty much automatically. So if I asked you to talk about the letter s, you might not have much to say. But for people who have to learn English, it’s quite important, and can prove to be a tricky little customer.

The first area of confusion is with plurals. Most languages don’t add s to make a plural, like English does, so it can be very hard for speakers of those languages to remember to add the s. Even when some languages do add an s, it’s in a slightly different way. Portuguese and Spanish, for example, often add an s to a noun to make it plural. But, they also add an s to adjectives describing those nouns, leading a lot of Portuguese and Spanish speakers to do the same thing in English. French is similar, but the s is generally silent, meaning that a lot of French speakers don’t pronounce it even if they write it.

But the most common area of error is with third-person singular verbs. That might sound like gibberish, but let me demonstrate: Continue reading →

Hallowe’en Reads: House of Leaves

Niall O'Donnell 13 Comments

I love Hallowe’en, always have since I was a child. I loved the sense that the barrier between our reality and a mysterious, dangerous plane of existence might be opened for one night a year, and anything could happen. It was terrifying and exciting at the same time. And though now I don’t believe in the supernatural, I still love horror films and stories. So between now and Hallowe’en, I’ll share my thoughts on some of my favourite horror fiction.

I’ll start with House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000). Continue reading →

How to Use Apostrophes

Niall O'Donnell 22 Comments

‘

That little  chap there is by far and away the punctuation mark that causes people the most consternation, for a variety of reasons. Some hate it because they have no idea what to do with it, and others hate it because those first people have no idea what to do with it, and it drives them crazy to see it misused or not used at all. Before getting into why people have difficulties with it, and why that infuriates others, let’s look at the basic rules of using the apostrophe. It has three basic functions: Continue reading →

Different How?

Niall O'Donnell 2 Comments

Any time I’m writing and want to show a difference between two things, I find myself pausing. For example:

Reading a language is very different…

…from writing it?

…to writing it?

…than writing it?

They all sound ok, but in the end I usually plump for from, as it sounds more natural, but I’m never quite satisfied, as the other two still sound basically ok too… Continue reading →